A wealth of information is currently available to physicians (and other medical professionals) to provide assistance in treating patients. Further, systems now exist for aggregating this information into a central repository. However, physicians often access this information through disparate application modules and associated workflows. Each application module may allow a physician to access a subset of information pertaining to a particular patient and process that information using particular functionality. For example, a physician may use a first application module to interact with lab results, a second application module to review the medical literature, a third application to prescribe medication to patients, and so on. After interacting with several such application modules, the physician can then manually correlate and synthesize the insights provided by the disparate application modules. However, this approach is inefficient and burdensome. This approach is also prone to errors. For example, a physician may use a collection of tools in treating a patient which fails to reveal pertinent information regarding the patient; as a result, the physician may make an incorrect or non-optimal decision regarding treatment provided to this patient.
To address this issue, a developer may attempt to reconfigure plural application modules into a larger cohesive body of functionality. However, this solution is not feasible in many cases. For example, the redesign of software is a time-consuming and expensive task. Further, different application modules are often produced by different respective providers based on different design paradigms; hence, these modules can be considered non-cooperating functionality with respect to each other. This issue compounds the difficulty of integrating the functionalities provided by the application modules.
The above-described challenges are cited by way of example, not limitation; other challenges may exist. Further, other environments (besides healthcare-related environments) may face similar challenges.